Matt Borghi

Songs, soundscapes, and improvisations for deep listening.

Tag: Soundscapes

Songs… An Invitation to Deep Listening

July 21, 2026 / / 0 Comments

I’ve been quite inspired with the songwriting aspect of my work for the last couple weeks. Towards a Western Sky, while a bit of a sleeper amongst my soundscape work, was a pivotal release for me in many ways, something that I’ve been reflecting on recently. 

When I started making ambient and soundscapes 30 years ago I came at things as a singer/songwriter/guitar player. As I explored soundscapes and moved to computers, synthesizers and sound processing I would often wonder: What if I could bring about these sound worlds, these portals to deep listening with a basic augmentation to my singer/songwriter guitar set up. I explored this in parallel to my soundscape work for years and pursued many experiments to try and make it work.

I got close a few times.

Mostly it never worked until one day when I realized that it wasn’t about songs and songwriting as much as it was about textures of the guitar, voice, words, rhythm, nuance, timbre and color. The sonic palette is much more rudimentary, guitar, voice, words vs. the wide stereo of synthesized soundscapes, kind of like comparing a black and white photo to a high resolution color photo; different perhaps, but the essence is the same.

As I work on the new songs, I encourage my listeners to forget about “songs”, as the pervasive ear worms that invade our thoughts or become sonic bookmarks of our lives and rather think of them as sonic vignettes on the other side of the spectrum from the longform soundscape. Each of them is an invitation to deep listening. Start here: https://mattborghi.bandcamp.com/album/toward-the-western-sky

Matt Borghi Toward the Western Sky

Improvised Ambient Guitar Soundscapes with Ableton Live Channel on YouTube

April 28, 2016 /

I’ll dispense with the ‘I haven’t written anything here in a while’ preface and get right to the meat of it. Michael Teager and myself are preparing to go into the studio and work on our next Borghi-Teager studio album. This time I don’t have much in the way of ideas and I’ve been spending my time practicing improvising.

Key to my improvisational work is Ableton Live, and after some reviews of Shades of Bending Light dismissed the idea that it was, in fact, wholly improvised, I’ve decided to document, via screencasts, my practice and rehearsal sessions for our next studio album, blemishes, wrong notes, warts and all, so that folks can go behind the curtain and get a conceptual understanding of the craft of our brand of improvised ambient soundscapes.

Additionally, much of the music is pretty good. I’ve surprised myself at times, which is the best part about improvisation… there are about five videos up at the time of this writing, and the music is really quite good. Sometimes, it stalls, and that would be edited out of any recording session in the post-production cull, but here there’s no post-production, I record live, render/upload it out of Camtasia and call it a wrap. So that’s it. That’s what I’m doing.

Also, maybe, some folks might be interested to see what I’m doing in Ableton Live. I haven’t used another piece of software for music since 2002. It’s all I use. All of my effects are standard, out of the Ableton box, and I find that it does everything and more that I can dream of, including things I never thought that I wanted it to do. For a while, many folks believed that Ableton Live was really just for electronic and EDM, but there are many contemporary composers out there proving that wrong and I hope that my vids do just that.

Anyway, thanks and enjoy!

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